International SEO Domain Structure
-
Hi Guys,
I am wondering if anybody can point me to a recent trusted report or study on international domain name structure and SEO considerations.
I am looking to read up on the SEO considerations and recommendations for the different domain structures in particular using sub-directories i.e. domain.com/uk, domain.com/fr.
Kind regards,
Cian -
Good post. However be aware that "UK" is not the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 country code for the United Kingdom - it's GB so en-GB for English speaking users in the United Kingdom.
-
Just to add Google's guidelines here-
-
Hi there,
When organising your site infrastructure to manage multilingual versions of your site and adapt content for different country targets, there are three main hosting options:
- Root domain ccTLD’s (example.fr, example.co.uk,)
- Subdomains (fr.example.org)
- Subdirectories and subfolders (example.com/EN’, ‘example.com/EN-UK’ or ‘example.com/EN-US)
As each has unique pros and cons, the option you choose will depend largely on the size of your organisation, the locations of your likely target market, and of course your budget.
If you choose the best, most practical option, it will complement your other efforts and add up to a whole that boosts your immediate rankings and sets the foundation for a long-term international SEO strategy
We have an exceptional international seo checklist guide in moz that you can see here moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist and if you want to extend this information about the domains will be very useful to read this one http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-without-boarders-a-guide-to-international-seo-nick-paterman/60092/
Hope it helps you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International SEO and duplicate content: what should I do when hreflangs are not enough?
Hi, A follow up question from another one I had a couple of months ago: It has been almost 2 months now that my hreflangs are in place. Google recognises them well and GSC is cleaned (no hreflang errors). Though I've seen some positive changes, I'm quite far from sorting that duplicate content issue completely and some entire sub-folders remain hidden from the SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
I believe it happens for two reasons: 1. Fully mirrored content - as per the link to my previous question above, some parts of the site I'm working on are 100% similar. Quite a "gravity issue" here as there is nothing I can do to fix the site architecture nor to get bespoke content in place. 2. Sub-folders "authority". I'm guessing that Google prefers sub-folders over others due to their legacy traffic/history. Meaning that even with hreflangs in place, the older sub-folder would rank over the right one because Google believes it provides better results to its users. Two questions from these reasons:
1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong? 2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Instead of trying to fix and "promote" hidden sub-folders, I'm thinking to actually reinforce the results I'm getting from stronger sub-folders.
I.e: if a user based in belgium is Googling something relating to my site, the site.com/fr/ subfolder shows up instead of the site.com/be/fr/ sub-sub-folder.
Or if someone is based in Belgium using Dutch, he would get site.com/nl/ results instead of the site.com/be/nl/ sub-sub-folder. Therefore, I could canonicalise /be/fr/ to /fr/ and do something similar for that second one. I'd prefer traffic coming to the right part of the site for tracking and analytic reasons. However, instead of trying to move mountain by changing Google's behaviour (if ever I could do this?), I'm thinking to encourage the current flow (also because it's not completely wrong as it brings traffic to pages featuring the correct language no matter what). That second question is the main reason why I'm looking out for MoZ's community advice: am I going to damage the site badly by using canonical tags that way? Thank you so much!
G0 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
SEO page descriptions on mobile - how to hide while preserving the juice for SEO?
Hi everybody, On our pages we have crafted good text paragraphs for SEO purposes. On desktop everything is fine but on mobile the paragraph of text pushes the main content really low on the page. Is there a way of hiding the text while preserving the SEO juices and not getting penalised by Google for spamming techniques? I'd appreciate any recommendations on how to deal with this. Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Firebox0 -
95% of organic traffic lands in my homepage, despite having a 250 page website with a "seo optimized" hierarchical structure. Any suggestion as to what might be happening?
Challenging issue All the "usual suspects" have been discarded: all pages included in google index, no google penalties, metas optimized, kw's segregated by pages/cluster of pages to avoid cannibalization... BUT, we know we are missing something website is www.e-florex.com and is an e-commerce site based on magento Any ideas you might think are worth exploring? Thanks in advance for your help Juan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juanmarn0 -
SEO value in baclklink from blog.domain VS domain
Will a back-link from "domain.com/abc" and "blog.domain.com/abc" have same value from an SEO perspective? Assume same article written on both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
I have been told the bots look at the domain value and the only links from blogs that have less value are in case of comments. As long as the "blog.domain/abc" page includes a full article and not a blog comment then it counts fully for SEO. Is this correct?0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will a lot of organic traffic be lost at first (if non-www are getting a good amount of traffic)? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0 -
Domain migration strategy
Imagine you have a large site on an aged and authoritative domain. For commercial reasons the site has to be moved to a new domain, and in the process is going to be revamped significantly. Not an ideal starting scenario obviously to be biting off so much all at once, but unavoidable. The plan is to run the new site in beta for about 4 weeks, giving users the opportunity to play with it and provide feedback. After that there will be a hard cut over with all URLs permanently redirected to the new domain. The hard cut over is necessary due to business continuity reasons, and real complexity in trying to maintain complex UI and client reporting over multiple domains. Of course we'll endeavour to mitigate the impact of the change by telling G about the change in WMC and ensuring we monitor crawl errors etc etc. My question is whether we should allow the new site to be indexed during the beta period? My gut feeling is yes for the following reasons: It's only 4 weeks and until such time as we start redirecting the old site the new domain won't have much whuffie so there's next to no chance the site will ranking for anything much. Give Googlebot a headstart on indexing a lot of URLs so they won't all be new when we cut over the redirects Is that sound reasoning? Is the duplication during that 4 week beta period likely to have some negative impact that I am underestimating?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlie_Coxhead0